Computers and their application programs are used in all aspects of business, industry and academic endeavors. In recent years, there has been a technological revolution driven by the convergence of the data processing industry with the consumer electronics industry. This advance has been even further accelerated by the extensive consumer and business involvement in the Internet. As a result of these changes, it seems as if virtually all aspects of human productivity in the industrialized world require human/computer interaction. The computer industry has been a force for bringing about great increases in business and industrial productivity. Almost every week seems to bring computer industry advances which promise even further increases in productivity. These advances offer to drive down business and industry costs and increase efficiency, in addition to increasing productivity. In addition, the cost of “computer power” continues to drop as a result of rapid advances in computer related technologies.
Despite all of these advantages, there still remains great resistance in all industries and business fields to new computer systems and significant system upgrades which offer much in productivity increases. This resistance results from past experience which equates installing new computer systems or significant upgrades in existing systems with large amounts of down time; during which the business, manufacturing facility or individual worker functions are inoperative or operate at diminished levels. When a business or production facility is trying to decide whether to install a new computer system, the concern about down time, the possible loss of business, as well as stress on the workers involved, very often outweighs the cost of the installation in influencing the decision. The concern about business and production delays resulting from installation has become so great that fewer and fewer small businesses are trying to make system and program changes on their own. This concern is even greater when the business is considering the installation of a computer network. While many businesses would likely be much more productive if their computers were interconnected with each other, the thought of a network may be very frightening to many small businesses without too much computer experience.
As a result of these needs, the professional computer service industry, which carries out and supports installations and upgrades for the business and industrial sectors, has been rapidly expanding over the past decade. However, even with such computer professional support, the threat of such down time, coupled with the costs of such professional services caused by installation delays, remains of great concern.
Because of this expanding demand for computer and network installations, many major manufacturers and distributors of computer components, both hardware and software, have been expending great amounts of research and development effort to develop programming systems and tools to expedite such computer system and network configuration installation and upgrades. Such distributors need to be adequately compensated for their expenditures through the sale of their components used in the systems. On the other hand, there have arisen substantial numbers of seller or “reseller” computer installation organizations which market the installation and upgrade of computer systems and networks to businesses. Since businesses demand and expect the best total solutions for their needs from such resellers, it is often the case that the best computer system or network that the reseller installs uses few or no computer components manufactured or distributed by the developer and owner of the system and programs used to configure the system or network. The result is a dilemma for those involved in the installation and configuration of computer systems and networks. It would be advantageous for everyone in the industry to continue to use the programs and systems for the configuration of networks and to encourage the development of even more advanced systems and programs to do so. On the other hand, a way should be found for compensating the developers of such programs for their efforts. The above-referenced copending application Ser. No. 08/159,954 offered one solution. The distributer or manufacturer of the computer components that has developed the process for configuring computer systems or networks, provides to the seller or reseller a configuration process comprising a prompting system for computer purchasers to make a sequence of interactive data entries, each of said entries relative to the data processing needs of the purchaser of one of said computer systems, allocating said computer components to said computer systems based upon said user entries, tracking the quantities of said computer components thereby allocated to computer systems sold by said seller to said purchasers during a selected time period and determining to forego fees due from said seller to said distributer for said process when said quantities of components thereby allocated during said time period exceed a selected level.